Part 3, Note 36
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"1840--Daily Journal--1846 of the Late Rt. Rev. J. M. Odin," Southern
Messenger, June 15, 1893; Baptismal Records of St. Vincent de Paul Catholic
Church, Houston, 1841-1860, Records No. 12, 39-52; Jean Gross and Anders
Saustrup, trans. and ed., "From Coblenz to Colorado County, 1843-1844: Early
Leyendecker Letters to the Old Country," Nesbitt Memorial Library Journal,
vol. 1, no. 6, August 1990, p. 188; Colorado County Deed Records, Book G, p. 9.
In late December 1843 or early January 1844, a ship carrying 129 German
immigrants, 124 of whom were Catholic, arrived in Galveston. The newly arrived
Catholics immediately arranged to celebrate their arrival with a Mass, then went
west to look for land. Probably, many of these apparently devout Catholics ended
up in the Cummins Creek settlement and provided the stimulus for the development
of the Catholic congregation there. Supporting such an assertion are the facts
that in March 1844, two months after the settlers left Galveston, Father Ogé
made a trip to Cummins Creek, and two months after that, a church was being
built (see Letter of Jean Marie Odin to Jean-Baptiste Étienne, January 12, 1844,
Episcopal Collection, Papers of Jean Marie Odin, Catholic Archives of Texas;
"1840--Daily Journal--1846 of the Late Rt. Rev. J. M. Odin," Southern
Messenger, June 29, 1893).
The fact that the Germans practiced Catholicism further
isolated them from the Anglo community. An anti-Catholic fever was rising in the
United States in the 1830s. The feeling was fuelled by Maria Monk's 1836
bestselling book Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery in Montreal,
which told how, as a Roman Catholic nun at the awful Montreal nunnery, she had
been compelled to participate in the routine lecherous behavior of nuns and
priests in secret underground chambers. Monk, who appeared in New York in the
company of a zealous Protestant preacher, coyly accepted the sympathy and
adulation of the community for the ordeal she told everyone she had survived.
Her celebrity was only slightly tarnished by the revelation that she had never
been in the convent, but had in fact been a prostitute. Monk's theme, of secret
hypocrisies within the Catholic church, meshed nicely with that of the famous
preacher Lyman Beecher, whose 1835 book, A Plea for the West, told of
secret Catholic conspiracies to take over the democratic governments of the
United States. These books were but two of the numerous publications which
devoted themselves to combatting what they called Popery.